Originally published at: Zoo bans woman having "affair" with chimpanzee | Boing Boing
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Somebody needs to explain to this zoo that chimps aren’t monkeys.
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Possibly a mistranslation from the Dutch?
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Somebody needs to explain to this zoo that it needs to explain to its translator that chimps aren’t monkeys!
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Inter species love affair? Love is love 
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I know very little of Dutch, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some languages don’t even have commonly used words for the different branches of the simian family tree. Anyone know enough about linguistics to confirm or deny?
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According to Google Translate (maybe not the most reliable source); Monkey and Ape both translate in to “aap” in Dutch; so you could well be on to something.
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Just let them marry each other
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I’m glad the zoo realised what she was up to. Nitwits like this don’t realise how their “harmless” fun can seriously mess up a wild animal’s life.
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“I love that animal and he loves me,” continued Timmermans. “I haven’t got anything else. Why do they want to take that away?”
This is incredibly sad if indeed a perceived relationship with an animal in captivity is the only thing she has going for her.
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Despite the many similarities found between human and chimp genomes, the researchers emphasized that important differences exist between the two species. About 35 million DNA base pairs differ between the shared portions of the two genomes, each of which, like most mammalian genomes, contains about 3 billion base pairs.
so (3.5e7 / 3e9 → 0.011) 1% variation is too far for sanctioned snuggles, but maybe 0.5% is okiedokie?
(“It’s not the percent homology, tis the alleles what counts” --Mary Chestnuttatcgtcggcgatcgac…)
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A wild animal would have better things to do. The real problem here is that it’s a captive animal with little to do.
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Agreed. A regular zoo visitor causing a problem indicates that the zoo staff aren’t doing enough to make the animals’ lives interesting. Bored intelligent animals is a recipe for trouble.
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Somebody buy her a dog.
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she really needs a life… i’m not sure the chimp it really the captive one here.
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Dutch is very close to German and German has one word for monkey and ape (Affe).
There is not a clear distinction between monkey and ape outside biological terms but if you want to talk biology there are more distinctions than just monkey and ape but this is above my expertise.
But yeah, probably the translators fault. Although, how do you translate a word if there are more meanings in another language? The speaker had no clear distinction in their head between monkey and ape so creating this distinction in the translation would create something that did not exist in the original.
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